I have had this experience of realization in my own life for the past several years. When I enter into a state of deep meditation I am abundantly aware of a magneticlike force, which pulls me in the direction of God. The revelations that I experience in those moments of God-realization represent a renewal of my mind. I reconnect to a kind of energy that propels me in the direction of a solution to anything that might be troublesome.
For example, something as mundane as purchasing a piece of property for my wife and myself to move to when our children leave the nest, was causing me a great deal of inner turmoil. I reminded myself to move into that invisible magneticlike field of energy and I was guided toward a solution. At precisely the right moment a friend called and said one sentence that put me at ease about the dilemma. Done! This is what I call realization in action.
We can all use this realization of the availability of spirit in the resolution of problems. As you learn to employ the first step, recognition of spiritual solutions, you will move to a state of realization in which you experience the power. You will realize that every kind of disharmony, discord, or disease is amenable to the spiritual energy that is in you.
THE THIRD OF THREE STEPS FOR ACCESSING SPIRITUAL DIRECTION
Reverence: Communing quietly with the spiritual force is our way of becoming one with it.
This third step, reverence, is acquired quickly by some people, while for others it can take a long time to achieve. Communing quietly with the spiritual force and becoming one with it means there is no sense of separation. We know our divinity and commune with that part of ourselves. In other words, we see ourselves as a part of God; we are in a state of reverence for all that we are. There is no doubt of our divinity. In this state we fully experience this quote from the Bible: “On that day, you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (John 14:20).
Quietly communing with God, when we are searching for guidance, is a way of temporarily turning off our ego-mind. Instead of our ego-self thinking, “I can fix this,” we are willing to immerse it into our higher self. Like a drop of water separated from its source the little mind is unable to create and sustain life. When the drop of water rejoins the ocean it has all the powers of its source. The drop of water separate from its source symbolizes our ego-self when we are separated from our source of omnipotent power.
Communing quietly allows us the direct experience of knowing a spiritual solution to every problem. With our divine connection we are always in touch with the solution. Problems persist when we fail to recognize, realize, and finally, quietly commune with our own source, power, spirit, God.
I often think of Abraham Lincoln watching his beloved Union crumbling under the energy of hatred that engulfed this country. He wrote, “I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had no where else to go.” “To my knees,” is a way of saying, “I surrender to my source and turn this huge problem over to that same power that moves the stars.” You can do the same thing in times of strife. “Let go and let God,” as they say in the recovery movement.
When you practice communing quietly with spirit, you will sense the presence of a sacred partner. You can turn your problems over to this “senior” partner and move to a place of peace. The Indian saint Sri Ramakrishna used the following parable to teach his devotees how to reach the state of direct union with God.
A disciple once came to a teacher to learn how to meditate on God. The teacher gave him instructions, but the disciple soon returned and said that he could not carry them out. Every time he tried to meditate he found himself thinking about his pet buffalo.
“Well, then,” said the teacher, “you meditate on that buffalo you’re so fond of.”
The disciple shut himself up in a room and began to concentrate on the buffalo. After some days, the teacher knocked at his door and the disciple answered: “Sir, I am sorry I can’t come out to greet you. This door is too small. My horns will be in the way.”
Then the teacher smiled and said: “Splendid! You have become identified with the object of your concentration. Now fix that concentration upon God and you will easily succeed.”
The message is so clear. Become one with spirit and do not doubt or fear your divinity. Move beyond your ego-mind into your higher self. (I will not detail here the path to transcending the ego. I have devoted an entire book to this subject—Your Sacred Self.)
There is a spiritual solution to every problem. The three basic steps to access your connection to spiritual solutions to problems in your life are: recognition, realization, and reverence.
The balance of this first chapter discusses my meaning of the key words of the title of this book. I believe the definitions I use for spiritual, problem, and solution can form the basis for a unique way of bringing peace and fulfillment into your daily life. It is further my contention that once you internalize these three concepts you will rarely revert to the belief that you face insurmountable problems. Eventually, you will learn that all those so-called “problems” are dissolvable by saturating them with the higher energy of spirit.
What I Mean by Spiritual
It is written in the Bhagavad-Gita, the ancient Eastern holy book, “We are born into a world of nature; our second birth is into a world of spirit.” This world of spirit is often depicted as separate or distinct from our physical world. I think it is important to see spiritual as a part of physical, rather than to separate these two dimensions of our reality. It is all one. Spirit represents that which we cannot validate with our senses. Like the wind that we feel but cannot see.
Two great saints from different corners of the world as well as different religious persuasions have described spirit this way: “Spirit is the life of God within us” (Saint Teresa of Avila) and “Whatever draws the mind outward is unspiritual and whatever draws the mind inward is spiritual” (Ramana Maharshi). The key to understanding spirituality is this idea of our inner world and our outer world—one world, yet two unique aspects of being human. I have a friend who compares the physical to a lightbulb and the spiritual to electricity. He insists that electricity has been around as long as spirituality but that we did not make a religion of it when it was discovered.
Likewise, when I refer to spiritual I do not intend it to be synonymous with religious. Religion is orthodoxy, rules, and historical scriptures maintained by people over long periods of time. Generally, people are born into religions and raised to obey the customs and practices of that religion without question. These are customs and expectations from outside of the person and do not fit my definition of spiritual.
I prefer a definition of spirituality as described in Saint Teresa’s and Maharshi’s observations. Spirituality is from within, the result of recognition, realization, and reverence. My personal understanding of spiritual practice is that it is a way of making my life work at a higher level and of receiving guidance for handling problems. The ways in which I personally do this involve a few simple, but basic practices. I have enumerated them here in my own order of significance.
1. Surrender This is first because it is the most crucial and often the most difficult. For those of us who have grown up believing life is a “do-it-yourself” project it is hard to admit that we need the help of many others just to survive for a day. In order to surrender you must be able to admit to being helpless. That’s right, helpless.
In surrender, my thoughts are something like this: “I simply do not know how to resolve this situation and I am turning it over to the
